Resource URLs

Non-standard
This feature is non-standard and is not on a standards track. Do not use it on production sites facing the Web: it will not work for every user. There may also be large incompatibilities between implementations and the behavior may change in the future.

Resource URLs, URLs prefixed with the resource: scheme, are used by Firefox and Firefox browser extensions to load resources internally, but some of the information is available to sites the browser connects to as well.

Syntax

Resource URLs are composed of two parts: a prefix (resource:), and a URL pointing to the resource you want to load:

In this article, we focus on resource URIs, which are used internally by Firefox to point to built-in resources.

Threats

Because some of the information shared by resource: URLs is available to websites, a web page could run internal scripts and inspect internal resources of Firefox, including the default preferences, which could be a serious security and privacy issue.

Web sites can easily collect Firefox default preferences by overriding this pref() function and using the script resource:///defaults/preferences/firefox.js.

Furthermore, some default values of preferences differ between build configurations, such as platform and locale, which means web sites could identify individual users using this information.

Solution

In order to fix this problem, Mozilla changed the behavior of loading resource: URIs in bug 863246, which landed in NIghtly (Quantum) 57.

In the past, web content was able to access whatever resource: URIs were desired — not only Firefox’s internal resources, but also extensions’ assets. Now this behavior is prohibited by default.

It is however still necessary for Firefox to load resources in web content under certain circumstances. For example, if you open the view source page (View Page Source or View Selection Source), you will find it requires viewsource.css through a resource: URI. Resources that have to be exposed to web content have been moved to a new location named resource://content-accessible/, which is isolated and only contains non-sensitive resources. In this way we can keep essential resources exposed and have most threats eliminated.

Note: It is recommended that web and extension developers don’t try to use resource URLs anymore. Their usage was hacky at best, and most usage won’t work any more.